Just an odd thing I noticed…
But every time Imgur seems to be over capacity, when I open an Incognito window it comes up and works just fine.

And keeps on working fine. An Incognito window (chrome) seems to have far less trouble being over capacity then a normal window.

it just reinforces my suspicion that Imgur’s problem is not with capacity over all, but rather it has something to do with session tracking and individual servers. I am speculating here, but it is possible there is a load balancer (F5?) with ‘Sticky Sessions’ enabled and that keeps pointing a session to the same server. If that one server is having a problem the user sessions get’s stuck until that server is recycled or the session redirected.

For now, my suggestion to users who find Imgur is ‘stuck’ again…open an Incognito window and have fun.

Agreed, this does work I guess. I asked someone about this a while ago and from what I remember… It’s to do with incognito loading less things from the imgur server, meaning it’ll seemingly load faster (speed wise, it’s the same because there’s just less to load).

So if the site is having some issues being up to speed on your end, it’ll load easier if there’s less to load ergo incognito mode making the site “work better” but it’s actually just working the same amount, if that makes sense.

I’ve literally no knowledge in this area but my thoughts are that perhaps there’s some sort of time out thing where if things are overloaded it’ll time people out who are loading too much from the site at once. But I’ve got no knowledge on that, just assumptions

I am speculating here, but it is possible there is a load balancer (F5?) with ‘Sticky Sessions’ enabled and that keeps pointing a session to the same server.

That’s an interesting theory. Imgur has shared a general diagram of how the site works and you can be sure they are load balancing at several levels. But it’s all in the cloud and all API based, so I don’t think they have a need for maintaining a session on a single server and I don’t think there is an AWS F5. (But sure, there might be something in Amazon offering sticky balancing, but I suspect not.)

Well, there seems to be a little need. In Incognito my account stays logged in, which I assume is cookie based. But for instance, the ad in the top of the window must be clicked away with each load of the page (not the ‘next’ button, but a true page load). So, behavior is different between normal and Incognito. I suspect that maintaining the session server-side has some benefits in user-tracking. Imgur working through an API and Cloud doesn’t necessarily change anything.

ps. Where can I find that diagram you talked about? It might help me understand it.

If that tech stack is still correct…
When Imgur hangs it is the first HTTP request that doesn’t get any response (I used Fiddler to track HTTP traffic). So, I assume it is the nginx proxy cluster that doesn’t honor it for some reason.

ps. not that they use a DNS round robin, which is not a true load balancer, merely a load distributor.

Well yeah this makes sense, the server is doing a lot more work for logged in users – retrieving username, user info, your preferences, recording your votes (showing vote controls), pretty much anything specific to you. None of that is free!

Compare with an anon user we can show that user the same exact generic, not-logged-in page we show to thousands of other anons at the same time.

Oh I see. In that case there should be very little difference, unless you got sent to a different server in the server farm because you reset all cookies and logged in again. That’s the main thing I can think of.

That’s why I suggested wireshark, at least to see what servers are being connected to for what. If it’s all round robin DNS, that should be at a higher level (= outside the scope of) the browser. If there is some sort of server difference though…

I’ve been noticing something similar…imgur will frequently hang while loading (fail to load) when I’m logged in. I’ll browse normally for a while, usually via reddit, then sometimes I’ll click an imgur link and it will spin/load until it times out. Reloading after results in the same thing. Loading the same URL in an incognito window will load immediately. Deleting all cookies for my logged-in session and refreshing will load immediately.